"Mindless Games" was the self-mickey-taking working title for Thomas Pynchon's masterpiece, Gravity's Rainbow. Never has a work been less mindless. However, the phrase applies in spades to the latest and perhaps greatest of all the risable, utterly incompetent, totally haywire policy initiatives the Howard Government has come up with in its eleven years of petty power.
The Mutual Assistance Arrangement with the United States will see Australia swap its Nauruan refugees -- 82 Sri Lankans -- for Cuban and Haitian refugees currently lounging in the refugee camp at Guantanamo Bay.
Ridiculous? Ludicrous? Hairbrained? Asinine? Bizarre? There are hundreds of words to describe this insane arrangement. Was the moron who thought this up Umeruhcan or Arsetralian? Turns out to have been Immigration Department secretary Andrew Metcalfe, in Washington last week to seal the deal. What a scenario. Officials of the clueless Howard Government and the historically inept Bush Administration falling about like the Twits from Monty Python.
Haitian and Cuban refugees in Australia ... come again? The Sri Lankans may be happier 'n' Larry to get into the US, where there are doubtless many of their countrymen (just as there are in Australia), but how many Cubans and Haitians reside in Australia? Hell, all their relatives are on the eastern seaboard of the US.
It looks like we are once again seeing the US and Australian governments playing with human lives as if they only existed on paper. Casual cruelty in the name of a cheap political fix.
John Howard says this arrangement sends a further clear message to boat smugglers that Australia won't tolerate queue jumpers. Is he mad? The overwhelming message of this cockeyed immigration policy is that if you want to get to Umeruhca -- where just about every refugee would love to go -- boat on over to Oz, the country run by twits.
Don't they know this? Maybe they do and just don't care.
Links:
• Refugee swap to bring Cubans here
• New asylum policy will result in more boats: Labor
• Refugees: Now for the US Solution
-- Olney Garkle
In May 2002 the then Minister for Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs, Philip Ruddock said that a newspaper report which claimed a refugee exchange with the United States of America, was wrong and that no special deal had been done for Australia to resettle people from Haiti and Cuba in return for the USA taking people from Nauru and Papua New Guinea.
As we wonder at the stupidity at the latest refugee deal with the USA, there is evidence of Ruddock's cold dead hands all over this. This brief report above illustrates that this new deal is not the first time that Bush and Howard talked of trafficking in human lives.
The question of the Christmas Island prison complex lurks in the background still unanswered. What is the future for the most expensive, highest security facility ever built in Australia (albeit an excised portion)? Who is destined to suffer there? Why do the Christmas Islanders not want the facility on their island? Does the Christmas Island complex play a role in the human trafficking deal? Why did the USA Homeland Security team fly in a chartered flight from Singapore in November 2006 to inspect the high security Christmas Island facility?
The new arrangements with the USA follows those with Indonesia and Malaysia - all secret deals between the Howard government and others which are a violation of international refugee protection obligations to not punish people, asylum-seekers, with the rationale of deterrent.
Posted by Bruce Over at the Garage on April 19, 2007